6 New Tips for Clash of Clans Farming in 2016

If you’ve been away from Clash of Clans for a while and decided to blow the dust of your beloved Town Hall, you might feel like a little overwhelmed. The recent December Patch made huge changes to the balance of the game, especially defensively, and what used to be an effective Clash of Clans farming strategy may now be completely worthless. In this article we’ll break down some farming tips that take advantage of the recent changes, and we’ll also highlight some base defense strategies that you’ll want to keep in mind to protect your own resources.

Farming Tip #1: Move that Town Hall In!

Exposing TH is now heavily penalized. If your attacker does less than 30% damage OR uses less than 33% of their troops, they can acheive a 1 star victory even though you will not receive a shield. This means you can get hit with many back to back raids before someone pounds you hard enough to buy you a shield, and all that hard earned loot will go to other Chieftains. To add insult to injury, your TH now holds a significant amount of loot so you are doubly incented to keep it protected. This is probably what SuperCell always intended, but they’ve finally found some mechanics to put it into force. The time has come Chief – MOVE IN YOUR TOWN HALL!

Farming Tip #2: Hunt Big Game

League bonuses make more worth it than ever to climb in rank while farming. Given that you have to take steps to protect your Town Hall already, you will gain more trophies defensively than you might expect. Work this to your advantage, and try to push up a few tiers from your more comfortable old farming grounds. At TH9 I found I was able to push to Masters and even Champions – something I would not have expected was ever within my reach. At those higher levels, pulling in 200-300k Gold/Elixir and 2500+ Dark Elixir per fight is common (especially when considering the league bonus). In my experience it now proves a more reliable way to pull in big gains than trolling the lower leagues in the hopes of finding abandoned or rushed bases in my range.

Farming Tip #3: Maximize Shield and Guard Value

The new Shield and Guard system is another way that SuperCell has tried to shake things up. Instead of immediately losing a Shield, you can now attack and keep your Shield active for the cost of few hours of protection. You can also attack an unlimited amount once you get down to the last bit of protection called “Guard”. There are various nuanced ways you can schedule attacks to take advantage of this mechanic, but I find that generally its good to always be attacking. With League bonuses you should be hitting opponents for close to the resource cap every time you win, but troop costs will offset that slightly. Still, if you are lucky one attack should about offset what you’ll take from a loss, and the Shield mechanic allows you to get 3 and sometimes even 4 attacks before it completly runs out if you are obsessing and always ready when troop and spell training complete. Get those attacks in, and you’ll keep making farming progress toward your next big upgrade.

Pro Tip Even if an attack costs you more than your remaining Shield time, you’ll still get the full Guard time after that fight – so get one in right before the bell.

Pro Tip “Nexting” does not eat time on your Shield, so if you don’t see anything you like, you can bail out of matchmaking and not lose any time. This means you can be very picky about who you attack.